Game Connection Europe 2014 Impressions – Creature Battle Lab

I didn’t get the chance to sit down with too many mobile titles at the recent Game Connection Europe event, aside from yesterday’s What on Earth!

preview, anyway. The other mobile project I did get to hear more about was Dojo Arcade‘s upcoming Creature Battle Lab . In short, CBL lets you customize a team of creatures and send them onto the battlefield – one at a time – to combat rival scientists’ creations in themed arenas.

The Dojo Arcade Team

The first major component of CBL is obviously the creature customization. Players have a “goo meter” that serves as a visual aid to determine how far they can customize their creature. As players augment the body shape and physical features of their critter, the goo slowly drains; when the meter is empty, you can no longer apply cosmetic changes to the character. That said, there are an incredible number of shape and feature variations, which are broken into four categories: Shape, attachments (accessories), skin, and color. These designs can then be shared to Twitter and Facebook, so that friends can easily download your designs.

After creatures are customized, they must be given 4 battle skills to use in combat. Skills are categorized by their elemental attribution – fire, ice, electricity, and a few others – and creatures can mix abilities from different elemental trees, or go all in and specialize in a single element. Each ability tree contains a mix of melee, ranged, buff, and debuff skills, with more abilities that can be unlocked as players earn them through experience gained. (Skills cannot be purchased through in-app purchasing, however, all cosmetic upgrades can be unlocked from the start for a small fee estimated at ~$5.)

The Lab

When it comes time to actually do some battling, players can either hop into the story mode, where they will compete in tournaments against fellow mad scientists in matches that slowly increase in difficulty, or make their way straight to the arena mode for real-time, asynchronous online battling. In the tournament mode, players will have to select a team of their creatures to enter, having to select different ones to battle as others get tired from previous encounters.

Combat is well suited to mobile devices, as players can swipe their finger to dash/dodge around the arena, tap to move their creature, and click on the desired skill before use from the on-screen display. Abilities all have cooldowns, which can be affected by the battle arena itself. Each stage is themed, tied to an element much like the creatures’ skills. If you have an ice ability in an ice arena, that move will cool down quicker (honestly, no pun intended), and in some cases, may become more powerful. However, bring a fire-based attack to an ice-stage, and the ability will be weakened and may take longer to recharge. In addition to this, each stage comes complete with hazards and traps to watch out for. All of this serves to offer an interesting tactical layer to combat, as players will have to decide whether they want to build creatures that dominate particular arenas, or are more balanced and able to handle themselves across a variety of stages.

At the end of combat, creatures are rewarded three different types of “DNA” to use as they see fit. “X” DNA is used to unlock cosmetic customization options, “Y” is for opening up new combat abilities, and “Z” DNA is used to increase a single creature’s stats. In tournament mode, creatures do not earn experience as a team, so if players want to increase the abilities of more than one creature, they’ll have to train each of them individually. As previously mentioned, cosmetic options can be purchased if desired, but abilities and stats can only be increased through combat, so there’s no pay-to-win aspect of Creature Battle Lab .

If all goes according to plan, Dojo Arcade hopes to start a testing phase soon (read: Before the end of the year), inviting players to try the game out as they begin polishing the development. The hope is to then launch the final product in early 2015. Creature Battle Lab will first release on iOS, and then be ported to Android if there is enough interest. The game is built in Unity, so bringing the development over to Android shouldn’t prove too difficult. If you’d like to know more about CBL , you can check out the game’s website, follow along on Twitter, or “like” it on Facebook.